eHealth, mHealth, Telemedicine & eHealth services

Η eHealth offers a way to communicate and better connect people and health professionals. Such eHealth solutions have the power to revolutionise traditional medicine through patient-centred and data-driven healthcare. More and more countries are now aiming to transform healthcare to a digital approach.

Η eHealth is the most prolific use of digital technology, the internet, healthcare administrative and clinical processes and social media. With the use of eHealth technology, an individual's health records are automated and multiple devices such as smartphones, netbooks, laptops and personal digital assistants are connected in a healthcare setting. In recent years, it has evolved far beyond the simple concept of health IT.

With detailed information about a patient's illness, doctors could create a reliable medical history. By using eHealth and digitizing personal health information, better medical records can be developed. In addition, electronic records can be easily shared with other doctors. Patients are equipped with their goals The eHealth industry targets electronic records and offers eHealth industry targets the opportunity to make appointments with doctors. The benefits of eHealth care are limitless and all converge to improve chronic health management.

Many countries have developed and effectively harnessed the benefits of eHealth. Every citizen has a personal website where users can log in confidentially and monitor their treatment and diagnoses. In addition, users can make appointments with their doctors, monitor their medication and order medicines from pharmacies. Some of the eHealth solutions are widely used around the world:

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems brings together patients' health records in digital format to make the information available to both patients and doctors whenever and wherever they want.

Telemedicine: This eHealth solution offers patients medical care 24×7 by remote doctors via video, phone calls or robotic technologies. Telemedicine helps overcome barriers in ICU and home care facilities and offers a proper expert opinion.

Remote monitoring: This technology has allowed doctors and other healthcare professionals to monitor their patient's vital signs, scores remotely. In addition, it offers closer medical monitoring of patients struggling with chronic diseases.
mHealth: mobile health offers informative health recommendations via smartphone and computer or tablet use. Such mobile apps help patients monitor their health and inform hospitals in case of emergencies.
While eHealth offers new opportunities to improve health management, there are some challenges to adopting the technology. Insufficient resources to support and develop the electronic system that supports eHealth is one of the biggest challenges around the world. Inadequate infrastructure, lack of awareness of the benefits of eHealth among patients, and lack of reliable, fast Internet connectivity limit leveraging the full benefits of eHealth.

The only key to all these challenges is to treat eHealth as one of the key parts of health planning and educating both doctors and patients on how to use eHealth systems.

In the future, eHealth will become a key tool for national health systems and will facilitate the daily lives of doctors and patients. The use of electronic health records and e-prescribing has already increased and will continue to increase in the future. These systems rely on interoperable digital systems to enable the exchange of health functions and in the future, such information will cross borders to improve healthcare management. This will allow US citizens who have travelled to India on vacation to obtain all healthcare documents and drug prescriptions at the Indian pharmacy. In addition, this will also benefit the medical tourism industry.

The use of artificial intelligence and robotics will increase in the future. Although fully autonomous robots that work on humans are still a distant future, the use of robotics components to assist healthcare professionals has already increased. For example, doctors are using robotic arms to treat patients, providing additional support for movement and limb manipulation.

The goal of the eHealth industry is to make healthcare facilities more accessible to patients, regardless of their location and time. In the future, digital health technologies will focus on bringing healthcare services closer to patients. For example, currently, in hospitals, emergency rooms are allocated according to the health of the patient and the urgency of their care. Using eHealth, patients could provide their symptoms through an app that can be digitally assessed and the patient could be given different levels of priority. On the other hand, instead of traveling a few miles just to see doctors to ask a few questions, patients can use digital in-home and take advantage of telemedicine technology to interact with doctors and receive e-prescribing at home.

The technology mHealth can monitor the user's vital signs and monitor abnormalities. In this way, users can get a doctor's opinion before their diseases progress. This will help improve diagnoses and minimize the mortality rate due to medical negligence. The Covid-19 pandemic has already proved conducive for the adoption of eHealth technology as the majority of clinics were operating at low capacity and major surgeries and procedures were postponed. During the pandemic, doctors and patients used mHealth apps to stay in touch with doctors and take better care of their health. However, all of these technologies rely on interoperability and strong Internet connectivity. Thus, in the future, Internet penetration will increase to minimize the distance between doctors and patients.

SOURCE: Path To The Bright Future Of eHealth Filled With Opportunities And Challenges